The Island

by Ben McPherson

  The edge of Elsa’s mouth twisted as she faced the road again.

  ‘Yes, this is Bror,’ said the voice. ‘We turned you away. This was inconsiderate.’

  ‘I understand the reason.’

  ‘My colleague did not appreciate the importance of your … reaching out.’ I could almost hear his smile. ‘Perhaps you might consider returning? I guarantee you a better welcome.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Elsa.’

  ‘Give her my very best.’ And with that he was gone.

  ‘Ask me what?’ said Elsa.

  ‘What is your history with Bror?’ I asked levelly.

  ‘I mean, he’s kind of an ex.’ She glanced across at me.

  ‘Kind of?’ When we locked eyes there was something apologetic in her gaze.

  ‘We went out. Half a life ago. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Vee.’

  I sat for a time, listening to the sound of the road over the sound of the air conditioner, staring at my wife as she stared at the road ahead.

  ‘So are you in touch?’ I said.

  ‘No. God no. Why would I?’

  She reached across with her free hand, and I clasped it tightly, threaded my fingers through hers.

  We drove on in silence, hands entangled, until we came to the exit for Garden Island. And all the while I was wondering what she wasn’t telling me.

  We stood on the slipway. The body bags were gone from the shoreline. Further up the coast children were swimming. Hard to believe after what happened here. But out across the water there was nothing to suggest the violence done so close by. The fjord was mirror-still. From here the island looked inviting.

  I could see the diver units further out: the marker buoys on the surface, the boats tracking the divers under the water. Elsa watched a diver as he handed something to the man at the helm of the boat.

  ‘Cal,’ she said, ‘don’t bodies float in seawater?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Then Licia is not down there.’ She took my hand. ‘Come.’ She led me along the shore to a small sandy cove. Just above the waterline lay a white plastic boat with a small outboard engine.

  ‘Pull from the bow,’ she said.

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘We’ll bring it back.’

  I looked towards the phalanx of police cars on the slipway.

  ‘We’re day-trippers,’ she said. ‘Far as they know.’

  No one was watching. ‘All right,’ I said.

  I bent down, took off my shoes, threw them onboard. Elsa stepped easily over the side as the boat slipped into the water, while I stood knee-deep, steadying the hull. She leaned forward, pulled out a pin, lowered the outboard into the water. She braced against the side of the boat, drew evenly on the start cord. I felt through the hull the tug and thrum of the engine. I jumped in, took my place in the bow, facing my wife. We pulled out into the bay, Elsa scanning the horizon, leaning forward, steering by instinct.

  Halfway across she slowed the engine. ‘There.’ She stood, hands shielding her eyes. I turned, saw ahead of us the silhouette of our wooden speedboat on the brilliant fjord, and at the helm a resolute little stick-figure.

  Vee turned to face us, then turned away.

  I began to get to my feet.

  ‘Cal,’ said Elsa. ‘Down.’

  I was tipping us. I didn’t have her instinct for the sea.

  I hunched down, watching the little red speedboat. Vee was heading behind the dock on Garden Island.

  ‘Did she see us?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  We continued on our course until we were past the island, then turned in. Soon we drew level with the dock, emptied now of boats. Signs in Norwegian and English warned us not to moor.

  Vee had not stopped here. Elsa nodded towards a spit of red-pink rock that ran out into the sea, hiding the coastline beyond. She turned. Her eyes flicked to mine.

  There?

  I nodded. Out of sight, I knew, were the cliffs, and the staircase cut into them. Licia had been alive on those steps; we had seen her reaching up towards the helicopter.

  We rounded the spit. There was the cliff wall. There was our wooden speedboat, moored at the foot of the steps.

  Elsa was frowning. Where was Vee?

  As we drew level with the speedboat Elsa hooked an arm across the side, passed a rope through a metal ring and back. She stood up, looked down into the boat. Her hand brushed my shoulder.

  I stood up, cautious. There was Vee, crouching low in the boat, hands across her face, rocking backwards and forwards.

  ‘Vee,’ I said.

  I felt Elsa slide past me, saw that she was securing the boats at the bow. I swung a leg across, stood, finding my balance as the speedboat gently rocked.

  ‘Vee.’

  When I crouched beside her I could hear the rapid in-in-and-out of her breaths. I put a hand across her shoulder. She leaned in towards me, and I held her very tightly. A tiny, sighing sound, then another, as she gulped air.

  I heard a splash, heard chain links on the fibreglass hull of the rowing boat, looked up to see Elsa letting the anchor rope run through her fingers.

  Vee took her hands from her face. Her eyelashes were matted and wet. I kissed the hair on top of her head, held my palms against her cheeks.

  ‘Dad,’ Vee whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘My poor tired horse.’

  She looked guiltily at me. Her eyes were shot with blood.

  ‘I wanted to see.’

  I nodded. Last known whereabouts.

  ‘I get it,’ I whispered. ‘We both get it.’

  ‘Dad, I want to go on land.’

  We followed a short distance behind Vee. From the edge of the cliff you could see the ledge where the man in the torn T-shirt had stood. I walked along the cliff edge towards the sheer wall of the staircase, looked down to where the girl matching Licia’s description had hidden from the gunmen.

  Elsa trailed her fingertips across the palm of my hand.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  You would never know, I thought. When you looked about you, the island was perfect. The neat lines of the cabins by the lake, the straight-sided path: the placing of manmade objects in nature, everything simple and rational. Ahead, Vee was walking the path towards the cabins.

  ‘So it was Vee,’ I said. ‘The Knights Templar websites. Looking for answers, she said. Been going there for months.’

  Elsa watched Vee for a time. Then she turned to me. ‘And if we freak out about that we make things worse.’

  ‘Yeah. I resisted making a point-by-point breakdown of why everything those people believe is wrong. Figured it would make it more attractive. We should catch her up, though.’

  She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Let her do this, Cal. Let her understand for herself the implications of what those men believe.’

  ‘All right.’

  I stood looking down through the cut rock at the slash of fjord water. That intense Nordic summer blue. If you dived in, the water would be warm on your body. But keep diving down from the surface and you would soon feel the cold peaty dark of the fjord. Winter was always there, three metres down, patiently waiting for summer’s end.

  ‘Elsa,’ I said, ‘why did you never tell me about Bror?’

  ‘How could I guess he would become relevant?’ That evasive little eye flick. So unlike Elsa. She seemed to notice it herself. She turned, made a point of meeting my eye. ‘I mean, here’s the thing, Cal … Oslo’s a small place. If you were going to parties at the Blitz squat, you knew Bror. He hung with the young Marxists. He was all Durkheim this and Lacan that, which was hilarious because he was a trance DJ. But he could make you feel that what he was saying made perfect sense, even when it didn’t. And he had a sense of his own ridiculousness, which I find kind of charming.’

  ‘And you guys used to fuck?’

  ‘I was sixteen,’ she said. ‘He was nineteen. I liked that he took me seriously.’

  ‘So that’s
a yes?’

  ‘The sex was vanilla. Take a breath, Cal, and remember what sixteen means.’

  She was right. I was being ridiculous.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I mean, I doubt if we’d get on these days, but he was kind to me. You know, first my mother died, and then Dad went completely off the rails. And in the middle of all that I had this unplanned pregnancy, and Dad insisted I terminate it but he wouldn’t come to the hospital so in the end I went on my own. And I was sitting in the hospital canteen afterwards not knowing if I felt good or bad about what I’d done, but dreading going home, and I guess Bror was there and he could see I was suffering, because he came over and offered me coffee and a cigarette.’

  I knew about the termination. She had never told me about Bror, though.

  ‘He was patient with me, you know. Didn’t pressure me into anything. I’d gotten really thin, and all my friends were telling me I needed to eat, or worse, that I needed to see a doctor or a shrink. Bror didn’t care about any of that. He was the only person who just seemed to get that I was in pain, and he listened to me – every evening for weeks, it seemed like – and then at the end of the summer he gave me a pile of books he hoped would help bring me clarity, and he never minded that I didn’t read them. The sex was the least memorable thing about that time.’

  We stood, watching the divers as they re-entered the water, closer to the shore this time. Here and there, I realized, you could see patches of dark red on the rocks, on the grassy banks. Vee was crouched by the side of one of the cabins, examining the wood near the door.

  I turned towards Elsa. ‘Would you be OK with me going to see him?’

  ‘Bror? Sure.’ She turned my hand over in hers. ‘Just don’t punish me for decisions I made when I was a kid.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘That was stupid of me. I’m glad you had someone who listened.’

  Ridiculous to be jealous over something so far away.

  12

  The three police officers who stopped us were kind and showed us nothing but respect. They understood, they said, our need to see for ourselves. But Vee could not be here on the island. None of us could. They escorted us back to the boat and shook our hands. ‘We feel for you,’ they each said in turn.

  Vee and I sat in our wooden speedboat, holding it in against the slipway, while Elsa stood on the pebbled beach, thigh-deep, holding the transom of the white plastic boat. Vee was carrying something delicate and soft, folded into her hands, held artfully against the side of her belly. I don’t think Elsa saw it.

  ‘What’s that, Vee?’

  ‘We don’t need the police to feel for us. We need them to do their jobs.’

  The object in her hands glimmered softly.

  ‘Vee, what is that?’

  Vee looked at me, guilty, then at her mother.

  ‘Please,’ she said gently. ‘She … she wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Vee,’ I said, ‘I am not a softer touch than your mum.’

  ‘She will freak.’

  Elsa shouted. ‘Cal!’

  ‘Vee,’ I said quietly, ‘do not play us off against each other.’

  ‘Dad, you know she will.’

  ‘No, she won’t.’

  ‘Cal! Now would be good.’

  Vee’s eyes flicked towards her mother. ‘Shouldn’t you go and help her?’

  Elsa was standing in the water, arms folded, the boat braced against her thighs.

  ‘Hold the boat to the quay,’ I said to Vee. I jumped up on to the jetty, walked a few paces towards the shore, jumped down on to the beach. At the water’s edge I took off my shoes.

  The water felt colder. The wind was getting up.

  We slid the little plastic boat up the beach. When we returned to our own boat Vee’s hands were empty.

  We sat on the sofa, Elsa and I, drinking our martinis as we watched the news on NRK, desperate for anything that could help our case. The presenter introduced a dark-haired woman, who began to hold forth about immigrants in heavily accented English.

  ‘Tasteful,’ I said.

  Elsa sighed heavily. ‘So there’s this stupid thought I have about Licia, and I can’t shake it.’

  ‘Tell me your stupid thought.’

  Our eyes met for a moment. We were on edge, worn out, could barely look at each other. She reached for my hand instead.

  She said, ‘Did I ever tell you about driving her to that house church in the Eastern suburbs? I mean, God knows why she asked me and not you, because it was four days before Franklin was born and I could barely walk. But anyway … I have this image of Licia standing there in the car park in her oversized woollen coat, folding and unfolding her hands, staring up at the open walkways that led to the flats. And I had the window open and the snow was gusting into the car. I asked if she had her inhaler, and she nodded and smiled the most beautiful smile and said, “All I need is to remember to breathe.”

  ‘She was so painfully nervous, so I went up with her. The elevator barely had room for two people and smelled strongly of sweat, and we took it all the way to the twelfth floor and when we got up there the walkway was slick with ice and the guard rails were low, and Licia got worried that I was going to fall, and she very sweetly held my hand, and we walked slowly up to this plain unmarked door. And from the inside there was just this music. The most beautiful melody, Cal: twenty voices – thirty, maybe – all singing in unison. And she turned to me and thanked me for not being weird about her coming here and asked me if I’d be OK getting back to the car. I called her my sweet child. And then the door opened, and there was this girl with white-blond hair wearing these ugly clumpy shoes, and she smiled the most beautiful smile and asked if she was Alicia Curtis. And Licia nodded, and let go of my hand, and began to walk across the threshold, and the girl asked if I wanted to join them. And I looked at Licia, and I could see what she was thinking. You know, No, Mum, please don’t, so I went downstairs to wait.’

  The woman on screen was ranting now. Her Norwegian accent got stronger by the second: ‘We need to look away for a moment from the obvious crimes committed by the Andersens because these crimes are a distraction from their actual message. And that message is that people in Europe are tired of their homelands being a dumping ground for the cultural detritus of Africa and the Middle East.’

  ‘God,’ I said, ‘this is chilling. What are they doing, interviewing her? What can she usefully tell us about Garden Island?’

  ‘She’s from a free speech think tank.’

  ‘Free speech?’

  ‘She makes a living winding up people like you, Cal. She’s a provocateur, and she’ll be finished soon. Can you please focus on what I’m trying to tell you? Because I was sitting there with the engine on and the heating up full, and the snow was falling all around, and the apartment building was beautiful in the snow. And when Licia returned to the car we drove quietly along the highway, and she was singing to herself under her breath, but she was shot through with excitement. So I asked her how it went and she said, “I wish you could know the happiness that true faith can bring, Mum.” And it was like the most perfect moment. Except …’ Elsa was shaking her head, biting back tears.

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘What if the island was her opportunity to get away from us? What if Licia actually wanted out?’

  I reached out a hand, drew Elsa to me. ‘She was happy with her life.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Wasn’t she?’

  ‘I guess I always thought so.’

  The woman on screen seemed calmer. She was speaking slowly, but her words were no less chilling. ‘Our culture is being held down by the ankles and raped, and it is being mongrelized. These are the real crimes being committed daily against the Norwegian people through this mass immigration, and that is what the Andersen brothers are trying – imperfectly and clumsily, I concede – to communicate.’

  The presenter on screen was trying to hold her to account. ‘But what these men did is not communication. What they
did is murder.’

  The woman turned contemptuously to the camera. ‘You see? Instead of reporting the message, you and your media colleagues brand them criminals and murderers and side with the people who would see our heritage disappear.’

  I could feel the anger rising in me. ‘Seriously, though,’ I said, ‘you can’t separate those men’s “message” from the killings. The killings are the message. Can we please watch something else?’

  ‘With pleasure.’ Elsa picked up the remote and flicked the channel.

  On screen a ginger-haired man was speaking English, slowly, to a very tall black man. ‘You are perfectly nice,’ he was saying. ‘And entirely welcome here. But Norwegian research proves your reaction time is likely to be slower than mine. And your IQ significantly lower.’

  I said, ‘I guess I was hoping we could watch something a whole lot less racist.’

  ‘Our TV is racist,’ said Elsa. ‘How did you never notice this?’

  ‘Just weird.’ I picked up the remote. ‘When everything else is so right-on.’ I flicked through the channels till I found a quiz show. The room filled with the sound of audience laughter.

  Elsa watched distractedly for a moment.

  ‘What, love?’ I said.

  ‘We need to visit that house church.’

  She drove purposefully, hands clamped on the wheel. Franklin sat in his car seat, alert and excited, very far from sleep.

  ‘Like this couldn’t have waited, Mum,’ said Vee. ‘If we get stopped, you know it’s zero tolerance.’

  ‘Why would they stop us?’ I said.

  ‘I can see she’s been drinking. The police will see it too. You’ve got a baby in the car, Mum. Kiss your driver’s licence goodbye.’

  ‘It was a couple of mouthfuls,’ said Elsa. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Plus, these people are Christians. They’ll all be at home in bed not having sex.’

  ‘Vee,’ I said. ‘Hush now.’

  ‘Plus there’s no reference to them on the Internet.’

  The eastern suburbs looked very like our western suburb. The same no-nonsense architecture, though the buildings were placed closer, and there were fewer trees. There were basketball courts here and a football pitch on green-painted tarmac which was floodlit, though there was light in the sky. There were more dark faces among the players here than in Øvre Øvrebøhaugen. Fewer cars.